What do we learn from the death of a lover, a best friend, an enemy? Isn’t the prime objective of a funeral or celebration of life to remind us to LIVE GODDAMN IT? If the point is to stand around drinking and eating and milling in small groups as we did at any of the myriad of dinner parties, this is not what he would’ve wanted. He would’ve appreciated some vigor, not hushed cocktail talk.
How do our rushing lives find meaning and goals? If we cannot see in the death of another a reason to shake of St. Vitus Dance and get on with living. What’s the thing you have to do, a project you must complete, the book that will remain unwritten unless you live, write, and fuck like you mean it.
Too many funerals this year. We’re coming to that age. My best friend was a hippie of the generation before me. His friends were cocktail friends. Their hippiness was a bit baked out of them, like dried jerky. Smiles. Apertifs. And some pictures of George. His past captured in a few hours of droll celebration. Just a cocktail party with a bunch of introverts and scoundrels. Not a single available target for my amorous thoughts or my rage.
One of his friends gave a nice poem or something or other of his love and appreciation of his friend. Snooze fest. Afterward, the muted tones, “Wonderful.” and “Can I get a copy of that?”
I wanted to strike up the band, smash a guitar, have a few more key lime pie bites. This is not how I want to go out. I’m going to set some agenda items right now. Rock ‘n Roll music. Everyone who wants to speak, sing, or curse is welcome. Let’s go out on a bang, not a white-bread whimper that expressed or celebrated any of our friend’s bravado or joy or love of frogs, music, poodles, walks in nature, a good book, a shared experience. It was as if no one in the room could recall the shared experiences of LOVE and LIFE. The room was contemplating their own deaths.
Sure, that is also part of what you do. You mourn and then you mourn again for all the shit you haven’t begun to do that you want done.
Here is the message: get on with it.
I was contemplating my creative oeuvre. There are still so many words to write, notes to sing, and imaginings to imagine. I see my fathers advanced and expensive degrees now gathering dust, unframed, in my music room, where my son’s stuff is still strewn about the room. When we are no longer pushing the stone up the hill it simply falls back into the ocean and great men of great works are forgotten and drowned. The wet rat of my current output at sixty one, for another week or two, is insufficient. I need more time.
What a waste is this toiling we must do for money and shelter and sleep. What little value is given to poetry, obscure pop songs, and novels in progress. I’m almost embarassed to talk about my novel, and the next one, already finished, and …
Blah blah blah, no one to talk to about creative life, creative living, Proust, Joyce, Miller, Kerouac. All these smart and semi-rich white people with so little to say. Nothing to say about our friend.
I wanted his dog to arrive and liven up the place. Alas, Argent and Sydney were not in attendance. She was the final love of his life, but she rejected him because he simply did not have enough money saved up. It was something else of course, but the money was the sticking point. As she moved to Santa Fe, he charted his course to Albuquerque. Like lovers who no longer kissed or made love, she was the dream within a dream of the woman he wanted.
I’ll admit she was attractive, wealthy, and thin. I’ll also recall her assessment of me several years ago as George and I were dropping off Argent while we went snow skiing in Santa Fe. It was my fatness she commented on to our friend. She was worried about my health.
When he told me this a few hours later in the afternoon hot toddy at the centerpoint lodge, I was furious. She had made a snap judgment. A ruling. Just as she had done with George. “Nope.” With George her beauty and intelligence held promise even as she withheld physical connections. For me, she was a thin, wealthy, woman who had rejected my friend, beside me, for not having enough money in the bank. Yeah, fuck that.
Now, I must look for other friends to step up their game. It is up to me to announce my honest intention, to fill some of the void of loss. To strike or restrike conversations about art, love, music, poetry, technology, and lovers.
It’s the end of the world as we know it. Tomorrow if the tyrant wins we must all flee for our lives. I’m planning the expatriation. Why not take the eager widow home tomorrow night and fuck for the survival of the human race? Of course my snipped wand produces no live fish. There’s still the freaky of it all.
“What’s the most freaky thing you’ve done?”
I’d like to ask her. She was quite insistent that we exchange phone numbers. “You should take me out on a date. I like to have fun. I’m financially stable. I want to travel. Someone to go with me.”
It must be Henry Miller now, Tropic of Cancer igniting my ipad, urging me onward in this dumb dark quest. Sex for sex is often more damaging than fulfilling. What containment would be required afterward? Do I care? How simple is a blowjob? How hard an extended yoga session of coconut-scented friction? Is there a problem?
I am conflicted. It’s not just a fucking I need. I am looking for a whiteout blizzard of slippery entanglements. Then quick release back into the settled grooves of our lives before we met, last night. She asked for my number. Her friend danced with me, reeled me in, put me in the seat beside her. Her friend. Her widowed friend. “About your age.”
She is a soul. A float post-death desperate for meaning and reason and love. Should I put forth my case truthfully? “I’d like to fuck our way into the new era together. No strings.” Or be open to “whatever” and more?
There’s nothing I want from this woman that I can’t get from the internet and some deft hand movements. Do you notice how the hunger goes out of life after orgasm? Some want to cuddle and nap. Some are inspired and energized and must get up to paint. There is no way for me to map or plan my debauchery, I simply have to jump in the water. Or don’t.
George would say, “Get in there my son.”
What’s the cost of this adventure? Must I go on three-year excursions to enjoy the company of a woman? Is my monogamous obsession a limitation? What’s the new world order of partnered sex these days? I have not been keeping up.
As I was telling her, last night, about my “books on dating” she made a clever comment. “Maybe you need to update your information. Listen to what I say. My experience.”
Yes, her experience indeed. That’s the puzzling part. She basically put it all out there for me. I suppose I’m attractive enough. Witty enough.
“Wine,” she said. “That’s the way to my heart.”
Oh dear. So, not a keeper then… She was never really under consideration. The singer was. Perhaps to her, the singer, I was like me to the other woman. Enough? Charming? I was trying to complete a conversation with the singer when this woman’s friend roped me in. I nearly escaped unscathed but when I got to my car I couldn’t enable the music. My phone was still on the picnic table inside the outside venue. I had to go back.
The scout snagged me again. We chuckled and danced a few more rounds. “You need to talk to my friend. She asked me to tell you.”
There was no reason for me to entertain the idea.
I sat next to her and listened to her story for a bit. Told a few of my anecdotes. I texted her when I got home, “Nice meeting. – John”
Now, we wait. Contemplate. Listen.
“You’re a fucking coward,” George yells.
He was there when the girl at the strip club singled me out. San Francisco. A boring and rainy night, she came in for me. Took me to the back. Gave me gifts and her number. She wanted to meet up again, outside the club.
I was also walking around the lake, back in my hometown, with the woman I would soon marry and sire two children with. But first, this stripper. No other way about it. She wanted a lark, I appeared to be that adventure for her. We met a few nights later. I booked a second hotel room in a nearby mid-tier modern hotel with good rates.
She took a bath, first thing.
I watched.
She showed me the Shae Butter Salve she wanted rubbed all over her body. It tasted good as well.
She stayed the night. We made love at dawn and she slipped away. Her boyfriend, who was totally cool with it, was picking her up on the Ducatti in five minutes. I fucked her an extra ten minutes to keep him waiting.
A month later, she was still emailing me back in Austin. She was going to ship the Ducatti to me. She was all bluff and bluster. Flirt and fantasy.
“I’m so sorry to inform you, Tiffany has died unexpectedly.” The text was allegedly from her boyfriend on her phone. And that’s the last I heard from her. One week later a package arrived. Not the Ducatti but a VHS tape of her modeling vintage lingerie. Odd. I passed it on to George a few days later. “I don’t want this shit. I have no idea how people get off on this stuff.” It was not to my taste but the taste of men, perhaps, who remembered the old corsets and over-strapped underwear.
I looked up the police records in her zip code for a few weeks. I even went back to the club years later, when I was visiting San Francisco. It was closed. That adventure closed, this one just dawning.
It’s up to me.
Ring in the end of the world with a meaningless tryst? Hope for the best and stay in my zen-mode of self-awareness and healing. She is not healing. She is an opening. An invitation. What’s the harm? Truth or dare?
What are you waiting for? It’s George and Shannon and Desmond. There are no extra innings. You leave it all on the field. Waiting will leave the work unfinished, your certificates gathering dust, your big books never completed.
Strike out for the shore. Treading water is not productive. Fear and anxiety are killers. Fuck the fear, do it. There’s no harm in being honest. In going for a fuck. In lightening her mood too, for a day or so.
Who the fuck knows what magical mysteries she might unfold.
fear : god > next | index
